In education, various advantages of using private teachers to give individual attention to accommodate each student's skill, educational goals and background are well known. Students can excel and improve immensely from the individual attention given. However, the costs involved including the cost of hiring private teachers and the cost of performing various tests/assessments of the student's skill, educational goals and background in designing individualized curriculum make the private teacher approach too expensive for most students.
Many conventional educational systems attempt to personalize learning sessions for students and avoid the cost of employing private tutors by using computer programs in place of actual teachers. However, these systems have gone too far in automating educational processes and consequently have been shown to be too automated and lacking the necessary involvement by actual teachers to make the systems effective.
For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,950 issued to Cook et al. discloses a system for interactive, adaptive and individualized computer-assisted instruction. The system delivers interactive, adaptive, and individualized homework to students in their homes and other locations. An agent becomes a virtual tutor acting as a student's personal and individualized tutor. The agent is individualized to each student and formed by the functioning of agent software with student data object. The student data object stores characteristics of the student and assignments set by the teachers and administrators.
Teachers use the system to perform such functions as entering initial profiles in student data objects, assigning students to subgroups, previewing, annotating and scheduling assignments, reviewing and commenting on completed homework assignments, and reviewing summary reports. Important teacher activities are as follows: the teacher controls the access and level of tools available to the student and limits the extent to which the student can alter agent personae; the teacher controls the student's use of the system by assigning, scheduling, and prioritizing the student's access to the instructional material; the teacher can customize material available to the students by modifying sequencing of instructional lessons, choosing the homework the student must complete, and sending messages to students; and the teacher's class management is aided by a facility to send messages, reminders, hints, etc., to students using email facilities.
A teacher can also add comments, if student homework is viewed on line by teacher. Email and newsgroups are used by teachers, non-interactively, to send information to their classes, such as schedule and material changes. Students can communicate with their teachers, and share work or interests with other students.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,904,485 issued to Siefert discloses a computer-assisted education where an INTELLIGENT ADMINISTRATOR, which takes the form of a system of programs and computer objects, organizes instructional activity, selects the proper lessons for each session, and administers examinations to the students. A given lesson is presented in successive, different ways, if the student does not master the lesson the first time. A help screen is available at any point during an instructional unit and allows a student to change skill levels, learning styles, request another explanation, and request a conference with a teacher. When the request for a conference is selected, the student is connected to a live videoconference with a teacher. A live conference option with subject matter experts makes it possible for a student who has mastered the unit but who is curious about tangential or deeper levels of the material to ask questions while his or her interest is still fresh.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,064,856 issued to Lee et al. discloses a learning system where all student workstations are in constant communication with a teacher's workstation via a LAN interface and local area network. Real-time communication between a student workstation and a teacher workstation allows the teacher to be informed of the student's progress and activities as well as allowing the teacher to tailor instructional programs for each student. The teacher can select material, including text, illustrations, length of lesson and questions to be answered, to comprise the courseware for a subject. Assignment process is controlled by the CPU of the teacher's station which downloads the control programs corresponding to the lesson segments selected by the teacher and/or a system program from the hard drive or other storage device of the teacher's workstation to the selected student's station.
After a predetermined number of tries, if the student still fails to grasp the material and answers some questions incorrectly, the system will send a message to the teacher's workstation indicating which material the student is having problems with. The teacher can then use his or her own methods to personally help the student to grasp the material.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,176,520 issued to Hamilton discloses a computer-assisted instruction system for a classroom which allows a teacher to share an electronic sheet of paper with one or more students in the classroom, enabling both the teacher and a student to write on the same sheet virtually simultaneously from different parts of the room. As a student physically writes on the surface of his monitor with the stylus, the image that is written not only appears on that student's display, but is also transmitted simultaneously to the teacher's station. When the teacher touches the screen where an icon for a student appears, the teacher and the student can begin hand-written screen-sharing communication.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,002,491 issued to Abrahamson et al. discloses a learning system for enabling teachers to teach students concepts and to receive immediate feedback regarding how well the student have learned the concepts. Students have a keyboard system to enable them to respond in a narrative fashion to questions posed to an entire class and the teacher is able to receive the responses individually as they are stored by the system at a central computer. If a relatively low percentage of students, as determined by the teacher, seem to be understanding the concept being taught, the teacher may choose to assign additional work to students, or may take remedial actions.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,302,132 issued to Corder discloses a system for reducing illiteracy of individuals by using computer technology to integrate multi-sensory stimuli for synthesis of individualized instruction, evaluation, and prescription for advancement of communications skills. The system will accept input from the teacher to control lesson scope and sequence and alternatively, the system itself contains decision rules to determine student needs based on the evaluation of system provided graded stimuli and matching student responses. If directed by the teacher, the system, through its speech synthesizer, encourages the student to use the available system resource, such as a touch screen, to trace the phonogram on the screen. If the teacher believes that a student needs special encouragement during the lesson, a message can be recorded using the “New Messages” button.
A common feature in all of the above mentioned educational systems is that they rely almost exclusively on just one type of the computer program tutoring method or the personal teacher tutoring method so that they do not fully realize the benefits of both methods. Further, none of these systems shows a computer-aided learning system for holding several concurrent learning sessions with students, where each learning session is selected by a teacher to be either an interactive learning session where the teacher interacts with the student on a shared basis or a non-interactive learning session where the student works independently of the teacher.
Hence, there has been a long sought desire among educators to develop a computer-assisted educational system that allows a balanced use of both the computer program tutoring method and the personal teacher tutoring method. With the on going desire to globalization, there is a desire to deliver instructional material developed in one country, for example in the United States, internationally.